Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
Why do we sing the Psalms and not sing the New Testament anyway?
Is it because the word Psalm means songs and people think they can't sing anything else?
Is there some rule that says a hymn or song must use words found in the Psalms?
|
No, we don't mock either OT or NT. Or discourage them by mocking. Lee did to the OT, just that. That is what I object to.
Again, where is the NT precedent for treating OT text thus? It wasn't biblical, it was cultural. It was about control. But I never meant to suggest we must only sing psalms.
What happened was, in about 1973 to 1975 some LC Christians started putting psalms to music. Of course, we also were singing "hymns and spiritual songs" as well.
We'll, it took off like wildfire. You should have heard some of those meetings! If you could hear the Son in the assembly, singing to the Father, it was there. I heard it.
Remember that originally the source text wasn't a series of disjointed aphorisms to be mined for today's sermon. It was a narrative with narrative structure. And the composers in the LC were 'recovering' (pun intended) the narrative. They would set 8 or 10 verses to song & the meeting would get into the heavens.
And that's not the worst of it! The psalms became a vehicle for dreaded Christianity to impinge upon the 'pure' (read: isolationist) LC. I think in particular of Keith Green's psalm 51, "Create in me a clean heart", but there were others as well.
Lee would have none of it. Inspiration must only exist in the LC, and only via his mediatory ministry. So he shut it down. And thus the die was cast: the Psalms were henceforth natural and fallen texts, or 'complex' if you want to be less blunt.
Back to the topic, do you think that if in the Lutheran Church anyone said, "Our brother wanted. .", everyone would understand it was Martin Luther? Or Wesley with the Methodists? But you can bet that if a Blended shows up to your meeting and intones, "It was our brother's dream to see. . ", everyone gets it. The name of Witness Lee doesn't even need to be spoken. So who is denominated, here?
There's a reason Lee's name doesn't get mentioned much in LC meetings much - they don't have to. Everything is understood - "This is what Lee wanted." If that lines up with scripture, which it often did, we'd congratulate ourselves on being biblical. If not, as sometimes happened, Oh well, too bad. It was what Lee wanted.